This boggles my mind. How can any teenager not want a drivers license?
When I was in high school (mid 1970’s, middle class suburbia) getting your license was vital…It was your ticket to independence, to adventure, and to just plain opportunity: to get out of the house, away from the parents, and do your own thing.Every single person I knew wanted to drive.
Now, recently, I’ve noticed a few teens in my own life who didn’t particularly care about driving, but I assumed that these particular kids were unusual. ** But I never thought it was a widespread phenomenon.
Has anyone else experienced this in their own social circles?
The article goes on to make social commentary that seems to me a bit exagerrated–about the Generation Y 'ers all sitting at home on Facebook, afraid to accept challenges, afraid to accept jobs that require moving to new cities, etc.
The author calls it " the most startling behavioral change among young people since James Dean ".
I don’t agree with the sociological mumbo-jumbo (the old Gen X, Gen Y, categories, etc).
But I do wonder if kids today really feel less interested in driving than the kids I went to school with.
**(These kids were girls, and very outgoing, with lots of friends who had their own cars, so they didnt really need to drive for themselves at age 16. Saved their parents some money, too )
I think a lot of it depends on where you live. I’m 41 years old and still don’t drive, and I’ve never had a pressing need to because I live in a city with an excellent public transit system (and seriously expensive parking). My daughter is 21 and doesn’t drive for the same reason.
My cousin will be 20 next month and neither him nor his best friend have licenses. They live with my aunt in Cleveland.
To their credit, they both became proficient at taking the bus during their senior year of high school and now take the bus to college/work. But it does seem foreign to me. Not only because I’m a suburbanite but also because every other adult in the family - the ones that live in Cleveland - has always been a driver.
They do need rides sometimes too, but I don’t know the frequency. Cousin’s friend, who doesn’t go to college but works, is trying to get his license I think. But he works in off-site catering so he could go to more jobs/have a more flexible schedule if he could drive himself to work.
More power to them, I guess. Public transportation is great if it’s available. Their lack of license only gets tedious when they start needing rides.
M 16-year-old has not been terribly motivated to get his license. We live in a large-ish small town. There is no mall or shopping center where kids go hang out. And in 2007, Ohio passed a law that prohibits drivers under 18 from having more than one passenger who is not an immediate family member in the car with them unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Picking up all your friends to go cruising is no longer an option.
apart from living in places with reasonable public transportation (and even then it might be advantageous to know how to drive even if you don’t own a car) I wonder how much of it is kids who manage to just get rides from others or convince their parents to take them everywhere.
My 17 year old son has no interest in getting his driver license or even driving for that matter. I always just chalked it up to him having Aspergers…had no clue it was widespread. Interesting.
My 20 year old son has no interest in driving either. We live in the burbs but he just walks or takes the bus/train wherever he wants to go. Also my daughter was 18 before she learned to drive, and that was just because she was going away to school and wanted to be able to get herself around an unfamiliar town.
I live in the city and I don’t need a car. I just walk or take the bus everywhere. But not everyone lives in cities with decent mass transit.
I think some of it nowadays might be economic. Jobs are hard to come by these days and people spend longer in college. I can imagine a lot of young adults not wanting to spend lots of money they don’t have on a car, insurance, gas, and maintenance.
My 18-year-old daughter renewed her Learner’s Permit rather than get a license. She has to be prodded to practice driving. She claims it makes her too nervous. Her older sister got a license at 16, but then stopped driving until she turned 19 and needed a way to get to work. Neither of them has been discouraged or frightened by their father or me. They just don’t have the same pressing desire that I did at their age to be an independent driver.
I don’t know the reason. I suspect the internet has something to do with it. They can chat online or text friends, and don’t have the same level of social isolation we did without being able to drive to see friends.
When I first had driver training and got my license, it was all free (1982-ish), except the cost of the actual license. Now, students have to pay for the training and all that stuff themselves, or have their parents pay. Maybe some can’t afford it?
My husband or I take him where ever he goes. He’s planning on going to college in our city for his first year, I’m hoping he’ll get his license by then. We shall see.
Well, clearly not the case with my kid, but I have friends who chauffeur their teenagers everywhere, and honestly it makes me a little nuts. It’s one thing to not want to buy them cars (or to share your own), but if you live on a road that has a bus route at either end, each of which will take you to a different subway line within ten minutes (and travel the majority of three towns in the process), no, you do NOT need to drive them everywhere. You need to buy them MBTA passes and stop planning your entire day around their hobbies and social calendars.
(1) The cost to drive a car is a lot higher now than it used to be. Gas is more expensive, insurance is more expensive, and cars are more expensive. A reasonably competent person could fix up a 70s beater, but there’s no way you are doing significant work on a modern car unless you know what you are doing.
(2) Until very recently, minimum wage used to be significantly lower than it used to be.
(3) More people live in cities now than they used to.
I know times have changed, but it’s still hard for me to wrap my brain around it. I got my DL on my 16th birthday, and had been counting the days to that moment since I was about 12.
My oldest son will be 48 this year, and he doesn’t drive either. He knows the bus routes in Seattle like the back of his hand. Bussed himself to a Dire Straits concert downtown when he was 14. His favorite tee shirt was one with a transit map.
The two younger boys got their licenses as teens but they absolutely hated riding the bus (still do), and they had friends who drove, so it was a peer thing with them.
Agreed. In our case this may be part of the reason my kids don’t feel the urge to drive. Even back in middle school they had to take the city bus to and from school, and use their bikes to fill any gaps in the public transportation loop. So at an early age they got that sense of independence, that “I can go wherever I want on my own” feeling that my generation found in the driver’s seat. I can’t remember ever taking the bus as a teen, and none of my friends did either.
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